Manufacturing Metrology and Standards for the HealthCare Enterprise

Spending on healthcare in the United States was about 13.2% of the GDP in 2000, which is $1.3 trillion, and continues to grow at the rate of 7.3% per year. This amount will reach $2.8 trillion dollars by 2011 (around 17% of the GDP). Healthcare and manufacturing share many similar organizational, technological and informational issues. Thus, the healthcare industry as a whole is a customer for the metrology, standard-setting support and technology approaches and solutions that our laboratory has developed for the manufacturing sector that are transferable or adaptable to the healthcare sector. The Manufacturing Metrology and Standards for the Healthcare Enterprise program at NIST has two thrusts: (1) Healthcare informatics; and (2) Medical devices. Healthcare informatics deals with all the processes or “software” of the healthcare enterprise: modeling and simulation, design and production, biosurveillance, manufacturing and its associated supply chains, and information and data management both in clinical practice and biological research. Medical devices deal with all the products or “hardware” of the enterprise: the characterization, design, manufacture, testing, and metrology of medical devices at scales ranging from large equipment to nano-scale drug delivery mechanisms. In this talk, I will describe our program activities in some of the above areas.